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Facing more competition than ever, Intel came to Computex to assert it’s ready to lead in the chip wars with new AI-focused processors for data centers and consumer laptops.
“Whatever has been done will be outdone,” Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said during his keynote at the annual trade show in Taipei. “That’s the spirit of today’s Intel. We are driven to outdo today’s technologies.”
AMD and Qualcomm are also pushing to sell PCs optimized to harness generative AI programs, such as chatbots and image generators. The increased competition threatens to drive interest away from Intel, which has long dominated the PC chip provider.
During his Computex keynote, Gelsinger highlighted how Intel is preparing to unleash its own next-generation chips for the coming AI era. In particular, he revealed more about “Lunar Lake,” a new processor family slated to power cutting-edge laptops in Q3.
(Credit: Intel)"It will power the largest number of next-generation AI PCs in the industry,” according to Gelsinger, who said 80+ Lunar Lake laptop models from 20 PC vendors are in the works.
He added that Lunar Lake is poised to offer major improvements in graphics, AI-focused processing, and power efficiency. “So it’s delivering Core Ultra performance at nearly half the power we had in Meteor Lake (the predecessor chip),” Gelsinger said.
(Credit: Intel)During his speech, Intel’s CEO also threw shade at rival Qualcomm, which claims its upcoming Snapdragon X Elite chips for Windows laptops beat the competition. "I just want to put that to bed right now,” Gelsinger said. “It ain’t true. You know, Lunar Lake, running in our labs today, outperforms the X Elite on the CPU, on the GPU and on AI performance.”
In a surprise, Intel hired rival TSMC—the chip manufacturing giant for Apple and AMD—to build Lunar Lake silicon, another sign that Intel’s hold over chip leadership has eroded. That said, Intel plans to use its own fabs to build “Panther Lake,’ which will succeed Lunar Lake.
Meanwhile, to address PC desktops, Intel plans on releasing new “Arrow Lake” chips later this year. Although these chips promise to pack AI-focused enhancements, Intel plans on releasing them using a new CPU socket.